A Decision Theoretic Approach to Congestion Control in Signalling Networks

Pettersson, Stefan

Arvidsson, Åke

Responsible organisation

Blekinge Institute of Technology, Department of Telecommunications and Mathematics

1996 (English)Conference paper, (Refereed) Published

Abstract [en]

Congestion control in the signaling system number 7 is a necessity to fulfil the requirements of a telecommunication network that satisfy customers’ requirements on quality of service. Heavy network load is an important source of customer dis-satisfaction as congested networks result in deteriorated quality of service. With the introduction of a Congestion Control Mechanism (CCM), that annihilates serv-ice sessions with a predicted completion time greater than the maximum allowed completion time for the session, network performance improves dramatically. Annihilation of already delayed sessions let other sessions benefit and increase the useful overall network throughput. This paper uses a decision theoretic approach that bases the decision of annihilation on the average profit attached to each of the two possible actions, i.e. annihilate or not. We describe the load dependent proba-bility distribution for the completion time, and discuss the use of attributes attached to each session describing the outcome of any performed CCM action, e.g. the bad will costs associated with annihilation. These attributes are also used to calculate the network profit for a given network load. The results in this paper indi-cate that the decision theoretic approach to the CCM (DCCM) can handle very high overloads, keeping the network profit on a reasonable level.